Wednesday, November 14, 2012

At an ocher-color preschool along a lane in Stockholm’s Old Town, the
teachers avoid the pronouns “him” and “her,” instead calling their 115
toddlers simply “friends.” Masculine and feminine references are taboo,
often replaced by the pronoun “hen,” an artificial and genderless word
that most Swedes avoid but is popular in some gay and feminist circles.

So, it's not about DROPPING personal pronouns, but rather avoiding gendered language. We've talked about epicene pronouns before (e.g. here), and other linguablogs have too.

Here's my question: Is this the clearest institutional endorsement of the phenomenon? I'm not recalling anything quite like it offhand. You could actually end up with kids using such forms pretty much natively, I suppose.

3 comments:

Hell, I'll attempt a defence of the headline-write: headlinese is often, as in this case, ambiguous.

"Acme to trim expenses by cutting free lunch"

would probalby mean nobody gets free lunch anymore, but

"Acme to trim expenses by cutting workforce"

would mean that certain bits of the workforce, not all of it, were cut.

The NYT headline could be read that *certain* pronouns were dropped ("han" and "hon".) Or, just as likely, you're right, and the writer doesn't know what a personal pronoun is.

Also, like Geoff Pullum, I very much doubt this is going to take, no matter how hard they try. And if it does, it won't eliminate sexism, anymore than the many cultures that have one pronoun for "he" and "she" (Mandarin Chinese, eg) are without sexism.